Notable Items:

Issue(s) Before the Court:

Petitioner's Claim(s):

Respondent's Claim(s):

Holding(s) and Disposition:

Material Facts:

• A full recounting of the facts is available below

Procedural History:

Rationale

Douglas Majority Opinion (Warren, Clark, Brennan, Goldberg)

• The present case, then, concerns a relationship lying within the zone of privacy created by several fundamental constitutional guarantees.
• And it concerns a law which, in forbidding the use of contraceptives, rather than regulating their manufacture or sale, seeks to achieve its goals by means having a maximum destructive impact upon that relationship.
• Such a law cannot stand in light of the familiar principle, so often applied by this Court, that a
• "governmental purpose to control or prevent activities constitutionally subject to state regulation may not be achieved by means which sweep unnecessarily broadly and thereby invade the area of protected freedoms." NAACP v. Alabama
• A full description of the rationale is available below

Goldberg Concurrance (Warren, Brennan)

• I do agree that the concept of liberty protects those personal rights that are fundamental, and is not confined to the specific terms of the Bill of Rights.
• My conclusion that the concept of liberty is not so restricted, and that it embraces the right of marital privacy, though that right is not mentioned explicitly in the Constitution, [Footnote 1] is supported both by numerous decisions of this Court, referred to in the Court's opinion, and by the language and history of the Ninth Amendment.
• I add these words to emphasize the relevance of that [Ninth] Amendment to the Court's holding.
• Moreover, a judicial construction that this fundamental right is not protected by the Constitution because it is not mentioned in explicit terms by one of the first eight amendments or elsewhere in the Constitution would violate the Ninth Amendment ....
• The Ninth Amendment simply shows the intent of the Constitution's authors that other fundamental personal rights should not be denied such protection or disparaged in any other way simply because they are not specifically listed in the first eight constitutional amendments.
• And the Ninth Amendment, in indicating that not all such liberties are specifically mentioned in the first eight amendments, is surely relevant in showing the existence of other fundamental personal rights, now protected from state, as well as federal, infringement.
• The inquiry is whether a right involved "is of such a character that it cannot be denied without violating those 'fundamental principles of liberty and justice which lie at the base of all our civil and political institutions.' . . ."
• The vice of the dissenters' views is that it would permit such experimentation by the States in the area of the fundamental personal rights of its citizens.
• I cannot agree that the Constitution grants such power either to the States or to the Federal Government.
• Yet if, upon a showing of a slender basis of rationality, a law outlawing voluntary birth control by married persons is valid, then, by the same reasoning, a law requiring compulsory birth control also would seem to be valid.
• In sum, I believe that the right of privacy in the marital relation is fundamental and basic -- a personal right "retained by the people" within the meaning of the Ninth Amendment.
• Connecticut cannot constitutionally abridge this fundamental right, which is protected by the Fourteenth Amendment from infringement by the States.

Harlan II concurring in judgement. Dissenting in reasoning. (alone)

• In other words, what I find implicit in the Court's opinion is that the "incorporation" doctrine may be used to restrict the reach of Fourteenth Amendment Due Process. [???]
• In my view, the proper constitutional inquiry in this case is whether this Connecticut statute infringes the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment because the enactment violates basic values "implicit in the concept of ordered liberty," ...
• For reasons stated at length in my dissenting opinion in Poe v. Ullman, supra, I believe that it does.
• While the relevant inquiry may be aided by resort to one or more of the provisions of the Bill of Rights, it is not dependent on them or any of their radiations.

White Concurrance (alone)

• In my view, this Connecticut law, as applied to married couples, deprives them of "liberty" without due process of law, as that concept is used in the Fourteenth Amendment.
• The Connecticut anti-contraceptive statute deals rather substantially with this relationship. For it forbids all married persons the right to use birth control devices, regardless of whether their use is dictated by considerations of family planning, Trubek v. Ullman, health, or indeed even of life itself. Buxton v. Ullman
• "Where there is a significant encroachment upon personal liberty, the State may prevail only upon showing a subordinating interest which is compelling." Bates v. Little Rock
• In these circumstances, one is rather hard pressed to explain how the ban on use by married persons in any way prevents use of such devices by persons engaging in illicit sexual relations, and thereby contributes to the State's policy against such relationships.
• A statute limiting its prohibition on use to persons engaging in the prohibited relationship would serve the end posited by Connecticut in the same way, and with the same effectiveness or ineffectiveness, as the broad anti-use statute under attack in this case. [invalidation by Overbreadth]

Black dissent (Stewart)

• But speech is one thing; conduct and physical activities are quite another.
• The two defendants here were active participants in an organization ... and then supplied the devices themselves ....
• ... we are not, in my view, justified in holding that the First Amendment forbids the State to punish their conduct.
• The Court talks about a constitutional "right of privacy" as though there is some constitutional provision or provisions forbidding any law ever to be passed which might abridge the "privacy" of individuals.
• But there is not. [a constitutional "right of privacy"]
• There are, of course, guarantees in certain specific constitutional provisions which are designed in part to protect privacy at certain times and places with respect to certain activities.
• I like my privacy as well as the next one, but I am nevertheless compelled to admit that government has a right to invade it unless prohibited by some specific constitutional provision.
• If these formulas based on "natural justice," or others which mean the same thing, are to prevail, they require judges to determine what is or is not constitutional on the basis of their own appraisal of what laws are unwise or unnecessary.
• Such an appraisal of the wisdom of legislation is an attribute of the power to make laws, not of the power to interpret them.
• The use by federal courts of such a formula or doctrine or whatnot to veto federal or state laws simply takes away from Congress and States the power to make laws based on their own judgment of fairness and wisdom, and transfers that power to this Court for ultimate determination -- a power which was specifically denied to federal courts by the convention that framed the Constitution.
• ... I merely point out that the reasoning stated in Meyer and Pierce was the same natural law due process philosophy which many later opinions repudiated, and which I cannot accept.
• If any broad, unlimited power to hold laws unconstitutional because they offend what this Court conceives to be the "[collective] conscience of our people" is vested in this Court by the Ninth Amendment, the Fourteenth Amendment, or any other provision of the Constitution, it was not given by the Framers, but rather has been bestowed on the Court by the Court.
• This fact is perhaps responsible for the peculiar phenomenon that, for a period of a century and a half, no serious suggestion was ever made that the Ninth Amendment, enacted to protect state powers against federal invasion, could be used as a weapon of federal power to prevent state legislatures from passing laws they consider appropriate to govern local affairs. [What is the Tenth Amendment?]
• And so I cannot rely on the Due Process Clause or the Ninth Amendment or any mysterious and uncertain natural law concept as a reason for striking down this state law.
• So far as I am concerned, Connecticut's law, as applied here, is not forbidden by any provision of the Federal Constitution as that Constitution was written, and I would therefore affirm.

Stewart dissent (Black)

Full Recounting of Facts

• Appellant Griswold is Executive Director of the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut.
• Appellant Buxton is a licensed physician and a professor at the Yale Medical School who served as Medical Director for the League at its Center in New Haven --
• a center open and operating from November 1 to November 10, 1961, when appellants were arrested.
• They gave information, instruction, and medical advice to married persons as to the means of preventing conception.
• A list of the material facts is available above

Majority Full Argument

• [General Statutes of Connecticut (1958 rev.): 53-32 and 54-196]
• [Standing Considerations]
• Coming to the merits, we are met with a wide range of questions that implicate the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
• This law, however, operates directly on an intimate relation of husband and wife and their physician's role in one aspect of that relation.
• The association (vis-a-vis "assemble"?) of people is not mentioned in the Constitution nor in the Bill of Rights. [NAACP v. Alabama, NAACP v. Button, Schware v. Board of Bar Examiners]
• The right to educate a child in a school of the parents' choice .... [Pierce v. Society of Sisters]
• ... the right to study any particular subject or any foreign language. [Meyer v. Nebraska]
• Yet the First Amendment has been construed to include certain of those rights.
• [other first amendment, unenumerated, rights]
• The foregoing cases suggest that specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance.
• Various guarantees create zones of privacy.
• The Third Amendment ... is another facet of that privacy.
• The Fourth Amendment ....
• The Fifth Amendment ....
• The Ninth Amendment provides: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
• We recently referred in Mapp v. Ohio to the Fourth Amendment as creating a "right to privacy, no less important than any other right carefully an particularly reserved to the people."
• We have had many controversies over these penumbral rights of "privacy and repose." See Breard v. Alexandria [allows prohibition of door-to-door soliciations]; Public Utilities Comm'n v. Pollak [allowing radio on public transport]; Monroe v. Pape [warrantless search and seizure]; Lanza v. New York [?]; Frank v. Maryland [warrantless public health search]; Skinner v. Oklahoma [forced sterilization, procreation is a fundamental right]
• The present case, then, concerns a relationship lying within the zone of privacy created by several fundamental constitutional guarantees.
• And it concerns a law which, in forbidding the use of contraceptives, rather than regulating their manufacture or sale, seeks to achieve its goals by means having a maximum destructive impact upon that relationship.
• Such a law cannot stand in light of the familiar principle, so often applied by this Court, that a
• "governmental purpose to control or prevent activities constitutionally subject to state regulation may not be achieved by means which sweep unnecessarily broadly and thereby invade the area of protected freedoms." NAACP v. Alabama
• Reversed.
• The core of the rationale is available above